he needed in order to be a full-time writer capable of producing One Hundred Years of Solitude.4
PLACES, NETWORKS, SKILLS, AND CONVENTIONS
García Márquez was once an anxious aspirant writer. Traditionally, would-be writers must learn several skills in order to become literary authors. To attain these skills, they need to convert them into professional conventions accepted by peer writers, gatekeepers of the publishing industry, and critics. Mastering these conventions gives writers access to professional resources and opportunities for advancement. Since some conventions are more difficult to master than others, the more difficult the convention, the more likely that its practitioner would attract the attention of vested groups in that professional activity. But if socioeconomic obstacles get in the creator’s way, skill learning becomes more difficult, as it did for the young García Márquez.
Table 3.1 García Márquez’s locations from birth up to publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude
| Location | Year |
|---|---|
| Colombia (1927–1955) | |
| Aracataca | 1927–1929 |
| Barranquilla, Aracataca | 1929–1930 |
| Aracataca | 1930–1936 |
| Sincé | 1936–1937 |
| Aracataca | 1937–1938 |
| Barranquilla | 1938–1939 |
| Sucre, Barranquilla | 1939–1942 |
| Zipaquirá, Bogotá, Sucre | 1943–1944 |
| Magangué | 1944 |
| Zipaquirá, Bogotá, Sucre | 1945–1946 |
| Sucre, Bogotáab | 1947 |
| Bogotá,ab Cartagena,ab Sucre, Barranquillaab | 1948 |
| Barranquilla,ab Sucre, Cartagenaab | 1949 |
| Barranquilla,ab Aracataca | 1950 |
| Barranquilla,ab Cartagenaab | 1951 |
| Barranquilla,ab Aracataca | 1952 |
| Barranquilla,ab Departments of Cesar, La Guajira, and Magdalena | 1953 |
| Bogotá,ab Barranquilla,ab Medellín,b Department of Chocób | 1954 |
| Bogotá,ab Barranquillaa | 1955 |
| Europe (1955–1957)b | |
| Paris, Geneva, Venice, Rome, Vienna, Warsaw, Kracow, Auschwitz, Prague | 1955 |
| Parisa | 1956 |
| Paris,a Heidelberg, Frankfurt, GDR (Weimar, Buchenwald, Leipzig, East Berlin), West Berlin, Prague, Moscow, Volgograd, Kiev, Budapest, Ujpest, London | 1957 |
| Latin America (1957–1967) | |
| Caracas | 1957 |
| Caracas,ab Barranquilla,a Cartagena | 1958 |
| Caracas,ab Havana, Bogotá,a Barranquillaa | 1959 |
| Bogotá,a Barranquilla,a Havana, Mexico City | 1960 |
| Barranquilla,a Bogotá,a New York City,b Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Mexico City,abcd Veracruzc | 1961 |
| Mexico City,abcd Panamá, Chichén Itzá, Acapulco, Pátzcuaroc | 1962–1965 |
| Mexico City,ad Cartagena, Barranquilla,a Bogotá,a Aracataca, Valley of Upar | 1966 |
| Mexico City,a Buenos Aires, Caracas, Bogotá,a Lima, Cartagena | 1967 |
| Europe | |
| Barcelonaa | 1967 |
| Source: Gabriel García Márquez Archives, HRC; García Márquez 2001a; García Márquez 2002; Martin 2009. | |
| a García Márquez joined an art circle.b Worked as a journalist.c Worked as a scriptwriter.d Worked in advertising. |
He was born in 1927 into a lower-middle-class family. His birthplace, Aracataca, was then an impoverished rural village in free fall after the abrupt end of its booming banana plantation economy. Aracataca is located in Colombia’s coastal region facing the Caribbean. But at this time, it was isolated; it was about a week’s travel away from Bogotá, the country’s capital and major cultural hub. Yet in this remote village, he accumulated literary capital for his future works thanks to the experience of living in his maternal grandparents’ house until the age of nine and in the company of several older members of his large family. After leaving that house, he joined his parents and six siblings (who numbered ten by the time he started college). He also discovered his father had five children out of wedlock. Many years later, as he faced the typewriter, the author was to transform those memories of his childhood and family into most of the stories and characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude.5
In his early years, his low social status and rural origins were obstacles. Despite being a very good student, his background prevented him from receiving a scholarship to study in a high school for elite students in Bogotá. Rather, the teenager was sent to a nearby town, Zipaquirá, where socialist-leaning teachers moved his artistic impulses away from drawing, then his main interest, to literature. They introduced him to Colombian literature (especially the works of the avant-garde poetry group called Piedra y cielo; Sky and Stone); contemporary Spanish and Latin American poets such as Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, and Ramón Gómez de la Serna; writers of Spain’s Golden Age literature, such as Miguel de Cervantes, Luis de Góngora, and Pedro Calderón de la Barca; and best-selling fantasy and adventure fiction for teens, such as works by Jules Verne, Mark Twain, and Alexandre Dumas. During his high school years, García Márquez, under the pen name of Javier Garcés, published several poems that followed the conventions of Piedra y cielo poetry in the school magazine and the newspaper El Tiempo. His first pieces of journalism, published in 1948, were also under the influence of this style that “sought new [literary] images to defamiliarize reality.” Along with other influences that he picked up later on, it
